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Voters report missing mail ballots as Bexar County points to data migration and state certification delays
Summary
Precinct chairs and voters told the Bexar County Elections Commission they never received expected mail ballots; Elections Administrator Michelle Carew said late state certification, data errors from a TEAM migration and postal delays explain most problems and that VR Systems received county data June 30 for cleanup.
Multiple precinct chairs and poll workers told the Bexar County Elections Commission on June 30 that many registered voters did not receive mail ballots in the spring elections, prompting repeated calls for process changes ahead of November.
"How could they have received a ballot from the elections office and not appear on the roster?" asked Linda Maldonado, a precinct chair with the Bexar County Democratic Party during public comment. Maldonado described knocking on doors and finding voters who said they had returned ballots that did not appear in county rosters.
Elections Administrator Michelle Carew said the county mailed almost 19,000 ballots during the primary and that the principal operational causes were late state certification of ballots and data problems after the county moved from the VOTEC system to the state TEAM system. "The biggest issue with the mail ballot was the certification of the ballot by the state," she said, and added that postal-service transit times varied by vendor: ballots mailed by the vendor sometimes arrived in three days, while locally mailed ballots sometimes took up to 10 days.
Carew described a range of TEAM-related data errors — truncated names, wrong or non-existent street names and other mismatches — that produced a backlog of returned registration cards and incorrect mailing addresses. She told the commission that roughly 10% of registration cards had returns tied to data issues and that VR Systems (the vendor under contract to replace the county's older system) received the county's data on June 30 to begin cleanup. "We're currently in the process to where they're looking at our data to make sure that if you live on Milky Way Drive, your address is pointed to Milky Way Drive," she said.
Carew said the county is using vendor tracking for outgoing mail and can mail ballots earlier in the process (up to 45 days in advance when certification allows). She also said staff are manually reviewing applications to reconcile TEAM outputs with the county's records and that additional staffing requests are in the budget process to handle manual processing needs.
The commission did not produce a precise count on how many voters failed to receive ballots; Carew offered an estimated delivery rate from vendor reports of about 98.75% but emphasized she was speaking off the cuff and that county staff are finalizing exact measures. Commissioners and public commenters urged the office to publish clear, public performance metrics on ballot delivery and processing ahead of November.
